Two facts should scare the hell out of us: one, according to Politico, Donald Trump is a big fat liar; two, as of Christmastime 2015, Trump is favored by nearly 40% of Republicans. The sum of that equation is that the classic virtue of Truth is dead in America. Truth, if I may eulogize her, had a good run, recognized as the bedrock of most religions, moral philosophies and cultures for five millennia. No more.

You may counter that politicians have always lied since time immemorial. But we are in uncharted waters now in that the mainstream media is allowing a majority presidential candidate to float untroubled on a platform constructed entirely of falsehood. When we say Trump is a "big fat liar," it is not meant in the literal sense that Trump uses to describe plump women. He is a fit and trim purveyor of big, fat, juicy lies. The fact-checking website, Politico, has rated 76 percent of Trump's statements "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire" bald-faced lies... stats that Al Capone and Adolf Hitler can't rival.1[see footnotes for hyperlinks to sources] They usually told at least partial truths--or their own psychotic self-believed versions of truth. Trump is not psychotic; he is a cold, calculating manipulator and exploiter, the poster boy for narcissistic demagogues, and he knows he lies. He's proud of it. Deception is, for him, part of "the art of the deal." And though he's a fascist, Trump is so devoid of reliable substance that we cannot compare him to Hitler. Hitler, like most intelligent fascists, got the trains to run on time; Trump can't read a train schedule, he has no capacity for complex or abstract thought.

Now, do we blame the American people (that is, 39% of Republicans) for swallowing his artificial lure... hook, line and sinker? No. We do not hold morons morally culpable, nor can we fully blame a public that has been deceived by the media so many times that they feel a Trump lie is merely karmic balance.

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Instead, I blame a Mockingbird. The CIA's Operation Mockingbird, to be exact. Senator Frank Church's "Select Committee to Study... Intelligence Activities," reported in 1976 that "the CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign [journalists... who] ...influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda." Operation Mockingbird, the Senate acknowledged, included "a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets."2 Reading deeper in the study's report shows that the word "foreign" was a lie itself, as the Operation also affected domestic journalism--and is still operational today, despite CIA director (at the time) George H. W. Bush's claim to the contrary.

On the eve of 2016, the CIA has a hand in every major U.S. newspaper and TV network, the proof being that the mainstream establishment "story" is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a crazed lone gunman, not an intra-government conspiracy, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.3 The Big Lie is now even mouthed by once-liberal stalwarts the Washington Post, PBS/Nova and National Geographic. [I don't say this without support, though the proof of my claim is too long to cite in this op-ed piece... I refer the reader to my other work, in the endnotes.4]

The point is, once government and media joined a confederacy of prevaricators headed by the CIA and the military-industrial complex, truth died in America. You can't run a democracy without a free and halfway-honest press, and you can't even run a puppet democracy once Americans become totally jaded. Propaganda cannot persuade a thoroughly-cynical populace. So the Mockingbird has come home, crow-like, to roost. Americans prefer any new lie (from Trump or whoever) as long as it's fat, fresh and juicy, and the CIA--stuck with stale and stinking old lies--now frets over what may happen if their chosen puppets, er, candidates, are defeated in 2016 by a two-bit con man from Queens. ~~~

3 With unabashed self-promotion, I refer the reader to my book: Killing JFK: 50 Years, 50 Lies: From the Warren Commission to Bill O'Reilly, A History of Deceit in the Kennedy Assassination, (2013, Sky-Fy Publishing). www.Sky-Fy.com

The Reverend Doctor Lance Moore is an ordained Methodist minister, holds a doctorate from Emory University, and is author of seven books. He was a repeat panelist on "Naomi's New Morning" (Naomi Judd's television talkshow); six-time contributor (more...)